One Hell of a Game Afoot
by AmberPalette
Summary: Lau finds his opium den patronized by a cast of peculiar characters indeed, some tantalizing, some sinister, and some downright odd-including a famous detective with a dysfunctional side-and helps Ciel to thwart that detective's arch-nemesis.
1. The Woman

**Chapter One: The Woman**

He was in heaven.

"You really once made love to a female doctor?" The voice was deep, smoky, honeyed. A throaty, syrupy contralto.

Bliss.

He was a seasoned lover. In his twenty-eight years, the roster had already grown so long he'd lost count. Even so, the vision sprawled beside him on his futon in the rich yet dank quarters inspired a sophomoric desire to brag.

"Why, yes," he drawled. He rolled over and pressed his lean, muscle-bound form against hers. "The Phantomhive heir's aunt, no less."

"What a conquest." She was slender, her breasts small and firm, and her skin the complexion of peaches and cream. Her hair was long, a chestnut with auburn highlights that smoldered in a sea of curls and waves over her milky shoulder. Her eyes were dark and brilliant and dancing with earnest intensity.

Nirvana.

"I don't think of women as conquests, that's too…misogynistic. They are more…pleasures. Fleeting dreams, lingering just long enough to relish, dissipating, sweeter for the brevity of the joy they bring." He stretched in such a way that ornate blue dragon tattoo weaving up his left bicep was tantalizingly visible.

"You do talk a lot," the girl, who was American, and had an endearing Mid-Atlantic twang in her cadence, chuckled. She laced a long, athletic leg across his belly. "Tell me about your tattoos while I feed you some of these absurdly fancy sweets you have ordered us."

"But of course, fair one." His right hand slid up her calf lightly, tickling her skin, seeking places on her body that he hoped might quicken her pulse and run her breathing ragged.

He hadn't yet divined her prowess in bed, after all. They were only undressed…thus far. But he was confident.

"The Mountain Master wears the Dragon to signify his rule over his Triad. Mine is centered in Shanghai, like my more...legitimate enterprise, Kunlun. The Mountain Master, or Dragon Head, is initiated young. The needle…it is painful, and yet rewarding. There is rapture come the end, you know…after the _piercing_…"

Yes, rapture.

He moved to suckle on her ear, but was foiled by the stuffing of a fruit pip into his mouth, followed by, when he swallowed, a frothy custard.

The woman grinned.

"Hang it all, Ms. Adler, I was moving in for the kill!" he stammered around the moussey paste. He tittered incredulously. So close...he was giddy. This one would taste of ambrosia, he knew it...

"Interesting terminology." She licked her fingers free of custard before his eyes, slowly, sensuously. God, she had perfect lips. The rouge had worn off at some point, when she had been passionately demonstrating her skills to caress his neck.

Happiness.

"Oh, my dear," and his fingers found their way into her hair, "it's but an idiom—"

"Stated by an idiot."

Delight….

Wait, _what?_

"Did I mishear….? Oh…"

The room lurched. He'd not chased the dragon in hours. His opium pipe lay forgotten near their pre-conjugal bed. What was this high?

"Oh," he repeated, followed by a stream of passionate curses in Mandarin, turning a cross-eyed look on the custard wrapper. And then, once more, "Oh." And finally, "Oh, _balls."_

"Indeed. It pays to know the local apothecary," the woman, Irene Adler, continued to grin like a puckish, ethereal sprite, while she sat up and disentangled herself from her Chinese….

…conquest.

"That," she added, "and to be in a perennial relationship with an ingenious chemist. A chemist, among other things."

"Why?" the Chinese godfather slurred. He rolled away from her form to the best of his ability, but a pile of silk pillows, a hand-painted screen, and a potted orchid were upset in the process. "Ah, rat shits..."

"It's like this, darling," Irene purred. She stood and calmly dressed, maddeningly, right before his eyes, cutting off his erotic access one body part at a time. Permitting him to gaze, but not to touch. "I was hoping you'd be patronized by a very particular gentleman, and I was hoping to gather information beneficial to his nemesis. Six hours of loitering and keeping your eager hands out of my intimate regions has worn my patience thin. I wasn't sure how you'd take it, so I drugged you to make our…breakup, shall we call it?...a little less difficult." She tilted her head entreatingly. "Would you please pass out now, so I can finish dressing?"

"I can consume quantities of opiates fit to drop a horse, madam," the conquered mumbled, pointing a finger at one of the six or seven Irene Adlers that divided and floated drunkenly before his vision. "My constitution….does nnnnnot permit….that you so easily…that I…so easily…succ….umb…."

Blackness.

It was dark when Lau Tao awoke in his private chamber, in his largest and most often patronized Whitechapel opium den.

"Well, bugger," he grunted, glowering at the ceiling and the tassels and frog knots on the walls, and thoroughly alone.

Almost, at least.

Still naked as a babe, he lunged upright, clicked his tongue, and casually turned to the diminutive Chinese girl who sat faithfully at his side, yoga-style, in a violet cheongsam.

Her eyes, peering out under moth-brows and a severely straight-banged, updone, and elaborate coiffure, were an unsettling canary gold hue, intense and emotionless, as she stared at him. She was so beautiful and so impermeably calm that she resembled a sleek kitten crafted of porcelain and eternally hunched over its prey.

She had probably been there for hours, sitting and gazing at his form with wry and faithful amusement while it snored at the rafters, since shortly after Irene Adler left. And she probably would have continued to wait indefinitely for his daft self to come around.

Oh bloody hell, how he loved her.

"I do say, Ranmao," he sighed, "I am a prat. A berk, even."

"Yup," she deadpanned, bobbing her head once.

Lau blinked. And then he erupted in giggles. "_Thanks,_ luv."

"Yup."

He drew a blanket over his form and rolled over onto her, snuggling up, demonstrating some peculiar mixture of childlike innocence and tawdry foreplay. "Hul-lo. So! Did you catch the lady that left here, probably in a hurry, a few hours…or, er, so…back?"

She stretched under him, and reported in her quiet, taciturn manner, "No lady at all. Skinny man. Came in right after he ran out. You had a pulse. Smiling too, in your sleep. No foamy mouth or seizures or paleness. No weapons in sight. So I let him go."

Ranmao was experienced in Lau's bacchanalian excesses. Over time, she had come to realize that as long as he was still breathing, periodic episodes of sated unconsciousness were to be expected.

Lau dropped his chin onto Ranmao's shoulder. "That's what I thought. Well, that's alright. He must have been an associate of Ms. Adler's, sent to distract you. Turns out she was a thorough and clever type, she probably knew I had a bodyguard."

"Yup."

"Say, Ranmao. Would it be terribly crass of me to ask you to sit in and cover your eyes next time I seduce a woman, to avoid this unfortunate occurrence in the future?"

"Yup."

"Yes, I thought so. Ah, what we do for love. Oh. I don't know my head from my arse, and have lost my pocketwatch."

"Yup."

" Tell me, is it time for my Important Client?"

"In three minutes."

"Splendid! Ranmao, d'you think I can get dressed in two and a half minutes?"

She looked him in the eye then, and turned on him a possessive, Giaconda-like smile. "I _know_ you can."


	2. Ratiocination

**Chapter Two: Ratiocination**

A man stood in the foyer of an opium den.

But not just any man. An important and dangerous and ingenious man, stooping with height through the low doorway, wearing a drab waistcoat under a set of black professorial robes.

And not just any opium den. The largest, the best-"recommended," opium den in Whitechapel, run by Shanghai's youngest, and yet most powerful, mobster.

This man loved power and wit. And so he came to this particular opium den for a reason.

He didn't proceed inside yet, though he checked his pocketwatch, and his host was due to greet him in mere moments.

The sea of lost and hiding souls writhed every so often—man after man, and some women, lords and beggars both, sprawled on Oriental rugs clutching the lip of a hookah or drinking deeply of a lazily smoking pipe. The reek of smoke and gin was pungent, even over the courteous burning, in seemingly every Buddha-or-boddhisatva-shrined corner, of incense. The walls and low-seated tables crawled with prideful Qing-Dynasty ornaments of the proprietor's home country and more legitimate vocation: paper-cuts of animals of the Chinese zodiac, lace-fine relief-carved cinnabar lacquered boxes and tables and hat stands, wooden dancing figurines, a whole row of tiger-headed hats, tasseled perfume pouches, weiping folding screens of scholars and cranes, cloisonné enamel jars, and so on. Scantily clad Chinese girls, shoeless and in many cases even further undressed, sometimes imbibed, sometimes brought tea or absinthe, sometimes stroked the hair of those who moaned in an indiscernible mixture of ecstasy and misery.

One or two confused denizens murmured nonsensicalities and grasped drunkenly at the Englishman's trouser leg. He nudged them away sharply, with excruciating precision, his mouth thinning.

The hand of his pocketwatch signaled the hour at hand.

But his host would prove punctual.

A gong rang. The sinister, golden, reverberating hiss of brassily sizzling atoms cleared the room in under ten seconds. In the end, save for those who were too drugged even to sit up, only two men remained.

They stood at opposite sides of the sweetly stinking opium den. One, the proprietor, was a tall, young Chinaman. The other, the visitor who had inspired the dramatic exit of female employees and sundry other cronies, was that even taller, middle-aged Englishman.

Neither moved. It was as if the sea of rice mats and hookahs and smoke between them was a pit of snakes whose level of venom was a mystery, and the first man to step into the mire was the first to risk dying.

Finally the proprietor—an exquisite-faced boy under thirty—came alight with a staggeringly handsome, incandescent smile.

He no doubt knew this smile held cajoling powers that bordered on the unholy.

"Wei chi," he murmured through his teeth. He advanced on his important customer. His was an effortless grace as he sashayed over, extending his right hand in eager deference. The tangzhuang of heavy teal brocade that hung from his frame glistened in the low light with visions of dragons, chrysanthemums, and butterflies. Most of all, butterflies.

He was long-necked and limber; his features were fine-boned and elegant and free of even a single blemish or scar. His hair was not queued in the usual manner of a Chinese "coolie," but rather, pragmatically close-shorn: a terse spitting in the face of his homeland's traditions. This untidy mess, combined with two short pointy black blotches of eyebrows and the perpetually lackadaisical droop of his dark, bottomless brown eyes, gave him the appearance of a lean, lazy and self-satisfied tiger cub.

"Welcome, Professor M," he sang, in perfect King's English. Despite the posh, crisp pronunciation, which uncannily effaced all traces of an Asian accent, his pitch lilted erratically; it crept up like a bouncing balloon to the highest rafters of a first tenor. There was no way around characterizing the man as…flaky.

But something about that very propensity to play with his food made him singularly unnerving.

"You are a clever one, to refrain from speaking my name until given permission," the unfazed Englishman granted. His voice was also high-pitched, but the detachment was cerebral and arctic, exacting, bearing not a trace of the former's childlike whimsy. His eyes, sunken under a pale, domed forehead, were a flinty, metallic gray. "Although, I hardly count myself surprised. I was told that the godfather of Qing Bang possessed a particular talent for handling thorny situations and prestigious clients. The child of the generation that suffered the Second Opium War must be in his own way worldly."

"Oh, dear sir, the stories I could tell you!" The Chinaman laughed, a reedy, infectious, irreverent crow of "AH, haha!" while smoothly retracting his unshaken hand. He stuffed both hands into his oversized sleeves; before he did so, there was a flash of scaly blue markings curving up his left wrist—some tattoo of Oriental design.

His guest swiftly gained the impression of having to corroborate with a gifted, but disturbed, toddler.

Of course, the Englishman was also positive that this very persona was a calculated one—perhaps even unto the Chinaman himself. A long-standing charade.

He smiled tepidly, with a blink of those hooded, frost-hued eyes. They swept once over the Chinaman's form and then his smile grew smug. "We are friends now, Mr. Lau. After all, I am cutting you into a fairly enormous merger. Please call me James."

The proprietor, Lau Tao, lifted one palm in graceful dissent. "No, if you please," he chirped. "I think I'd prefer to call you Professor Moriarty. Helps me maintain business acumen to observe at least a modicum of formality. You never know. The weasel comes to say 'Happy New Year!' to the chickens."

"Ah."

"And you, sir, are a professor of what subject? Maths, physics?"

"You judge correctly on both counts."

"Well I must say, I sent for a copy of your treatise on the dynamics of an asteroid, but could make neither heads nor tails of it. Terribly sorry, it seems your servant Lau Tao is an ignorant fellow!"

"I shan't penalize you. It is a most rarefied subject." A pause. "Permit me….to make an observation. Since you asked a question about me, naturally I should reciprocate…though it's not really a question, but rather a certainty."

"Oh?"

"Yes. Your reputation for bedding half the whores of Whitechapel and two thirds the duchesses of this whole fair country is no exaggeration," came the nonchalant declaration. "You are, it seems, a human aphrodisiac, and it is not merely due to the legendary effects of the drug you so often indulge."

Most men would be affronted by the blunt impropriety. But Lau's face froze in a mask of controlled impassivity. Indeed, it was not so much the question Moriarty asked that made him squirm. It was the fact that the man's eyes bore into him like a pair of steel screws, the fact that his head turned to and fro in a faintly reptilian manner, as if Moriarty was enjoying the prospect of discomfiting him.

It was the seasoned sadism, the taxonomic cruelty of pinning butterflies to cardboard, that made Lau continually wary of his guest.

"Oh? How did my honored guest arrive at such a conclusion?" He cocked his head like a fowl. A halo might very well have materialized above his brow.

Moriarty clapped his hands together, once, crisply. "Marvelous. You are a marvelous actor, boy. But your charming mandarin collar is turned down and unbuttoned, which I have never before seen on any, ah, shang-fuu, of your country, and what's more, you reek of ladies' perfume. Finally, if I am not mistaken, that smudge of red at the very tip of your collar is neither blood nor tomato juice, but rouge."

"Bra-voooo. A savant of deductive reasoning, I see." Lau smiled again; it was a reserved and enigmatic smile, a screen, a fence—a wall.

"Something like that." The remark apparently keenly amused the professor, who tossed his head to the side and laughed a chillingly normal laugh. "Too right, ah, Lord. He too would laugh."

His eyes went unfocused for a moment, as if the term "deductive reasoning" applied to a person of ambivalent emotional associations for Lau's guest. The Chinaman arched an eyebrow at Moriarty's total, if brief, change in countenance. It was an evanescent mixture of admiration and irritation that entered Moriarty's gaze, like a billow of the opium smoke flooding the chamber, before the moment passed.

"Either way, it proves an unsavory and quite possibly syphilitic lifestyle on the part of my latest business conquest, and so, I find myself as much the chicken and you as much the weasel as, I am sure, is your own perspective, but in reverse."

Lau ceased to be puzzled and became, for the first time, incensed. "Familiar with the 'Yellow Peril,' then?" he retorted with whip-snap sharpness, still with that smile. A subtly darker gleam had entered his eyes, one that betrayed a rarely-spoken resentment of the Occident and its ruling classes.

"Please. I'm no fan of Kaiser Wilhelm or his xenophobic ravings, nor of that crass American press god Hearst and his perpetuations thereof," Moriarty scoffed. "I've a far bigger game in mind than any illogical racial hysteria involves…though I am certainly not above exploiting the terror of lesser men to my advantage."

Lau let out a low and appreciative whistle.

"Thank you," Moriarty wryly replied. "So."

"So?"

"What was her name?"

The Chinaman's eyes darted about the space surrounding the Englishman's sharp face. He made a lightning-swift calculation born purely of gut instinct—and it was to protect the woman who'd fairly cuckolded him. Lau was many things, but not the sort of man to wish harm on any female. On the contrary, it was the gender that he fairly worshiped. "I don't recall. She was a good flourish. I was rather too carried away." He giggled and shrugged whimsically, with an utterly convincing display of philandering brainlessness.

And yet, it couldn't be clearer that Moriarty didn't believe him. "She must have been, for that to be your response, my young weasel," he chuckled, and the ambiguous meaning, as well as the understated threat, was deliberate. "Did you know, Mr. Lau, that you turn your head to left and also fidget the fingers of your left hand, when you are lying? Being aware of this would make you a still better charlatan."

Lau wisely did not linger on the subject, even to take pretended umbrage. He cleared his throat, and it felt surprisingly dry. He cleared it a second time. "To business, then, good sir?"

"To business."

"Please have a seat."

"Two conditions."

"Name them, good sir."

"Good has nothing to do with it, nor evil," Moriarty chuckled. "These, too, are the false constructs of the feeble-minded masses who are too frightened to really open their eyes, sharpen their wits, and judge discrete cases for their own merits. After all, wasn't it the French Realist, Taine, who said 'vice and virtue are mere products, like vitriol and sugar'? As a trade manager, wouldn't you agree?"

Lau kept meticulous blandness about his person now. Noncommitally, he replied, "I shouldn't wonder, Dr. Moriarty."

"I am glad we understand one another. The first condition is that you give me insurance of your continued business partnership by cutting your protégé into it. The boy, younger still than you, and of far humbler origins. Du Yuesheng, of the prominent ears," and he chuckled again, humorlessly, "who will be, rumor has it, assuming your 'throne' whenever you abscond or otherwise…expire."

"Your information is correct, professor, and I shall do so."

"Very good. Which brings us to the second condition: you will make this information known to no one else, I trust."

Lau's smile was beatific. "The mouse-catching dog steps on the cat's paws."

Moriarty blinked, but then slowly nodded. "I see."

"I am no fool," Lau clarified.

"You enjoy pretending to be one, though. In order to gain access to high and forbidden realms, and get away with…well, murder, yes? It's a unique strategy. Only a real fool would count you one, but in this world, there are many. Yes, a unique strategy, laudable."

The mob lord's grin seemed, somehow, to acquire a pair of predatory fangs. "Merely a necessity if you are a wanderer in a land of ghost-faced tophats."

Moriarty graciously smiled. "Magnificent. The foreigner who turns the oppressive force of his 'exoticism' into an asset. Well. I see I am making a worthwhile investment in you, lad. Forgive the tedium of these preliminaries, but one more thing. I want you to meet my second-in-command. My…hand of justice, we shall say."

"What sort of justice might that be?" Lau, truly amused, half-hooted.

"I wonder." Moriarty cocked his head in that serpentine manner.

And he snapped his fingers.

A soundless gunshot grazed Lau's right temple and landed in the wall over Moriarty, splintering wood, tassels, and a few jade ornaments. "Air rifle," the professor explained politely.

Lau, dazed by the lack of forewarning, raised his right hand to his calculatedly superficial injury, bringing back fingers full of blood. He had no time to react to what came next.

Two enormous, coarse, icy, ironclad hands closed around Lau's throat. An unseen force slammed him back against a stone-hard chest. One calloused hand scraped up the side of his face and seized his forehead, the other his jaw. A single sharp gesture and his neck would be snapped.

Moriarty smiled. "Ah. Moments like this surpass a particularly poignant movement of Schubert."

A spurt of Mandarin curses rushed through Lau's brain. But the Chinaman's face remained impassive as he stiffened in his seat, straining experimentally against the unimaginable and savage power that bound him. One of the iron-hands gripped his tattooed arm, which had flashed to his inner sleeve seeking a sharp concealed weapon. His assailant was also a master of observation—but of a kind that was primordial, predatory, bestial and instinctive.

He knew how to counter this. He had his own exquisite predator to unleash.

"Ranmao," he murmured his summons, not in alarm but in annoyance, while arching a single ink-spatter eyebrow.

The shadows shivered and stirred. The wall of muscle bracing Lau from behind jerked once, violently, and Lau was released.

He leapt from his chair and drew the needle from his sleeve, baring it like a dagger at the behemoth of an Englishman who stooped in agony and grasped at his kidneys.

A big man, barrel-chested, with cruelly thin features and high cheekbones, his hair going from a dark auburn to silver, and roughly Moriarty's age. He had the most vibrantly lapis blue eyes that Lau had ever seen, but they were too icy, too crystalline with an exacting and obsessive schadenfreude, to be called beautiful. He smiled a toothy, yellow-stained smile under his frosted handlebar moustache.

At Lau's side, draped across his shoulder limberly, was the attacker's attacker: Ranmao, whose own emotionless and feline gaze warned further swift retribution.

Moriarty applauded slowly. "Well played, all. Mr. Lau and Deadly Maiden, meet Colonel Sebastian Moran."

"The Sleeping Tiger, they call you, yes?" the Colonel leered. "Excellent. I chase tigers into Indian sewers, you know. I kill them."

"But you only use a gun," Lau returned levelly. "I don't need a gun to kill you. Just one clear shot, and a cat." He stroked Ranmao's hair possessively, and leered back.

"Grand!" the volatile Moran barked. "Have a seat, I'm done with my parlor tricks! Care for a smoke, boy? And what about your whore? Didn't know you could train Oriental whores to do tricks like mine! Course I've only ever met the ones in the Punjab, and a few Afghanistani girls."

Lau's face finally fell completely into an expression of purest, undiluted loathing. And Ranmao was, again, smiling—which was rarely a fortuitous sign.

"How now, Sebastian," Moriarty hummed, "I think you finally made our new business partner angry. Do let's be gentlemen about this." The way he turned his eyes on Moran subtly, wholly expecting acquiescence, signaled how lethal he himself was, if so effortlessly he could control such a brutal being.

"It's only she is no whore," Lau cut in pleasantly through his teeth. "It's only no lady is really a whore, in my book."

"Well I suppose SO, with YOUR track record!" Moran retaliated, thundering to a seat next to the professor. "How's that syphilis, my yellow friend?"

Moriarty clicked his tongue. "We've been over this subject, actually. No need for redundancy on such a tight schedule, Sebastian."

Moran's chin tilted back. "Ah. Do forgive me."

"That is up to Mr. Lau, not I." The levels of politeness and sensitivity on Moriarty's part, and the way he pristinely marmed Moran, who was clearly a sophisticated professional assassin, were, now, somehow absurd.

Lau was not lost on the bizarre double-edged personality of the professor, who seemed to him the most cordial monster ever to exist. He continued to handle this case of dynamite with expert light-handedness.

"Of course, all is forgiven," he trilled, while a hand squeezed the small of Ranmao's back in clandestine apology and gratitude.

She leaned into him closer in response.

"Oh, wonderful!" Moriarty breezily exclaimed. "Then, at last, to business!"

Lau sat. "To business."


End file.
